Machine-To-Machine (M2M) services, and requirements from M2M network providers are continuously increasing nowadays. Due to this increase, the operators (or network operators of mobile communication networks) are using dedicated network elements in the core network of the mobile communication networks such that the dedicated network elements or network nodes are used exclusively for M2M traffic or M2M related traffic to provide the capacity and resources needed for, e.g., millions of subscribers and devices, especially involving machine-to-machine functionalities, all over the world.
Machine-to-machine roaming partnerships and contracts are increasing between operators all over the globe to provide their business customers with the best and widest coverage.
In a typical mobile communication network, as a part of the attachment procedure of the user equipment, the respective (or responsible) base station entity of a considered user equipment, i.e. typically an eNodeB base station entity, will query a server entity (such as an Internal Domain Name System (iDNS) Server), typically using the tracking area information, in order to obtain an address of a network node providing the mobility management entity functionalities for the considered base station entity and user equipment, i.e. being the responsible mobility management entity node for the considered user equipment.
The selected mobility management entity afterwards selects a network node responsible for providing the functionalities of a packet data network gateway (PDN-GW or PGW). Typically, at the packet data network gateway, a packet data network connectivity (or access point name (APN)) is located, namely the packet data network connectivity requested (and/or subscribed) by the user equipment.
This selection (of the network node responsible for providing the functionalities of a packet data network gateway) can either be based on an information provided—by the user equipment, upon attaching to the mobile communication network—to the mobility management entity (MME). Alternatively, the address of the packet data network gateway to be used (for the access point name (or packet data network connectivity) by the user equipment) could also be provided directly by the home subscriber server, or (especially during a bearer setup procedure) by the used network node providing the functionalities of a domain name system (DNS), or the address of the packet data network gateway could also be configured on the responsible mobility management entity. Hence, the selection of the packet data network gateway is performed by the corresponding mobility management entity (network node) or by the serving gateway support node (SGSN) at initial attach of the user equipment to the mobile communication network, or during PDN connection establishment to the packet data network.
In case that—within a given mobile communication network or core network architecture thereof—at least part of the access point names are both used for machine-to-machine services (or to services that are related or similar to machine-to-machine services), and for non-machine-to-machine services (i.e. typically consumer services provided to (mostly) human operated user equipments, such as, e.g., interne multimedia subsystem services (IMS services) or the like), it can be challenging to provide corresponding network capacities such that quality-of-service requirements as well as mobility requirements can be met in each situation, especially in case that a considered user equipment (requiring either a machine-to-machine type service, or a non-machine-to-machine type service) is roaming in a visited communication network.